Transformers Historia Preview

Newsarama has posted a preview of the upcoming Transformers Historia one-shot, written by the extremely knowledgable Chris McFeely. With this preview, we finally know what format this retrospective on IDW’s thirteen years of Transformers comics will take. The one-shot will take a prose format, and will go through events chronologically, from the earliest origins of Cybertronian society with the Guiding Hand and Knights of Cybertron, through the age of the Primes and the first Cybertronian War, and beyond. First impressions of this one shot shows it to be a far superior summary of the continuity than the previous continuity recap, 2009’s The Transformers Continuum, and it will be a nice resource for those who want a quick reflection on thirteen years of comics but do not have time to read somewhere in the region of 300 Transformers comics.

So…. this was supposed to come out tomorrow. I hoped it would because my comicbook store is in Amsterdam and I don't get to go there often. But I'm going this weekend, so I was looking forward to picking it up then. But of course now it's not on the Diamond shipping list……….https://www.previewsworld.com/shipping/newreleases.txt

So…. this was supposed to come out tomorrow. I hoped it would because my comicbook store is in Amsterdam and I don't get to go there often. But I'm going this weekend, so I was looking forward to picking it up then. But of course now it's not on the Diamond shipping list……….https://www.previewsworld.com/shipping/newreleases.txt

I have to agree that I was kind of disappointed to see the Aligned Prime mythology get adopted as part of a major G1 continuity, but whatever. Barber killed it. I did really like the Animated ranking though.

I’d say it was no worse under Barber’s pen than it was under Shane McCarthy’s pen.

That’s certainly subjective.

But "the thirteen prime" was ultimately revealed to be literally mythos, and prime is all but a rank for the supreme commander. The thirteen are more of tribe leaders, and nobody ever holds matrix after nova and before optimus.

Initially is fine. However, they pretty much tried to make it a constant theme as time went on.

Well, I mean, realistically, given the sheer breadth of time that elapsed, it's going to take a lot to get past millenia of hard feelings so even as the war ended, it makes sense that cybertronians, much like humanity, isn't a sweeping monolith where one person gets to decide,"All is well." There's hard feelings from both sides directed at each other. Difference being tho' is that post Swarm/Death Universe Cybertron, they learned (or attempted to at least) learn from their mistakes whereas the prior millenia of generations did not. There's a difference between Nemesis/Nova/etc being completely corrupted and Optimus and Bumblebee struggling with the same decisions the prior regime made but not making those same choices. Even BB realized having the cons walking around with ID chips and explosions are wrong and did away with it.

Reddit is a nice balanced place for TFs fans as well imo. You have the disparate factions that love the various incarnations of TFs but with far (far) less of the trolling and/or relentless bitching. For the most part, everyone says their peace that doesn't devolve into the chaos that occurs here.

See, I like the idea of the Autobots *initially* being as bad as the Decepticons (and in certain cases, worse) because it really showcases how unique Optimus was when compared to all the Primes prior (and their actions). Not to mention it makes for a better case for why the Decepticons are the way they are instead of being cardboard mustache-twisters. The Cons are a direct response to the Autobots' own abuse of power and it took someone like Optimus (who himself was directly inspired by a miner named Megatron's writings) to right ship for the Autobots.

It's also really cool because the Decepticons were a reaction to the Autobots yet Megtron pushed it so far past what they wanted and abuse of power shifted the other way. I *do* think they could've done more with it however.

I love IDW 1.0, uneven as it is. I guess i give it a lot of leeway because of it's publication history. Trying to do an ongoing and long-form story across multiple mini-series (and eventually character one-shots), Hasbro's various mandates over the years (Costa's AHM Ultimates-style reboot that ended up not being a reboot, crossovers, *Aligned* and of course later, the Hasbroverse etc) was always going to be an uphill battle for comics like TFs in today's current marketplace.

That said, as I just gunned through the entire first phase of the IDW TFs, I have to say it was the most coherent read I've had since the earlier TFs run I never really got to read in order of release and I was always playing catch up.

Initially is fine. However, they pretty much tried to make it a constant theme as time went on.

TFW is in general a harsher environment for fan responses to Transformers compared to social media like Tumblr and Twitter.

Reddit is a nice balanced place for TFs fans as well imo. You have the disparate factions that love the various incarnations of TFs but with far (far) less of the trolling and/or relentless bitching. For the most part, everyone says their peace that doesn't devolve into the chaos that occurs here.

Rodimus Prime

I'm pretty sick of the Primes mythology. I prefer the Animated style of it just being a rank.

Seriously though, the whole "the Autobots were just as bad as the Decepticons" shtick got really old, really fast. I'm fine with shades of gray, but it really did feel like a crappy fanfic by Decepticon fans at times.

See, I like the idea of the Autobots *initially* being as bad as the Decepticons (and in certain cases, worse) because it really showcases how unique Optimus was when compared to all the Primes prior (and their actions). Not to mention it makes for a better case for why the Decepticons are the way they are instead of being cardboard mustache-twisters. The Cons are a direct response to the Autobots' own abuse of power and it took someone like Optimus (who himself was directly inspired by a miner named Megatron's writings) to right ship for the Autobots.

It's also really cool because the Decepticons were a reaction to the Autobots yet Megtron pushed it so far past what they wanted and abuse of power shifted the other way. I *do* think they could've done more with it however.

I love IDW 1.0, uneven as it is. I guess i give it a lot of leeway because of it's publication history. Trying to do an ongoing and long-form story across multiple mini-series (and eventually character one-shots), Hasbro's various mandates over the years (Costa's AHM Ultimates-style reboot that ended up not being a reboot, crossovers, *Aligned* and of course later, the Hasbroverse etc) was always going to be an uphill battle for comics like TFs in today's current marketplace.

That said, as I just gunned through the entire first phase of the IDW TFs, I have to say it was the most coherent read I've had since the earlier TFs run I never really got to read in order of release and I was always playing catch up.

The average comic book issue is 22 story pages, so 9,284 total pages… we can probably round it up to around 9400 and 9500 since some of those books are longer and there's also the various prose short stories in Wreckers and MTMTE/Lost Light.